"In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office."

Events

Thursday, April 30, 2015

I'm willing to bet that few of my readers are aware of the presence of a plaque in the Massachusetts State House honoring our Armenian community. (It dates from the Bicentennial year of 1976).

But most--especially this year--are probably aware of one of the historical situations described on it:

who reached these shores, having escaped from the tyrannical rulers of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. For centuries, the Armenians were subjected to political, social, and religious abuses, and the most degrading indignities of man's inhumanity to man, including mass genocide.

By tradition, the Turkish arrests of Armenian leaders in Constantinople on the night of April 24, 1915 have been taken to mark the beginning of a series of persecutions, atrocities, and massacres that have collectively become known as the Armenian Genocide: which, through the deaths of perhaps 1.5 million civilians, and the persecution and driving out of hundreds of thousands of others, eliminated the physical and cultural presence of this people in its historical homelands of Armenia and western Asia Minor.

The acknowledgement of this crime, which, committed in the context of an unprecedented murderous war, set the tone for further mass murders and ethnic cleansing in the subsequent hundred years of European history, has long been controversial in Turkey. The government of the modern state has not only rejected the terminology of genocide, but also claimed that whatever losses occurred were the result of either the general hardships of war or an open conflict between peoples for which the Armenians themselves bear some blame. (In one case, Turkey even pressured a Canadian local school board to drop the subject from the curriculum.) The current Islamist regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has been particularly vehement in its responses as the centennial loomed--witness the lengthy press release on "The Armenian Allegation of Genocide: The issue and the facts" (the title is revealing) from the Foreign Ministry.

It came as an increasing number of states and public figures not only marked the anniversary, but also made a point of speaking explicitly of genocide. The first to gain widespread attention for this step was Pope Francis, who called the atrocities "the first genocide of the twentieth century." Turkey called the statement "far from historic and legal truths" and "unacceptable." Denouncing the "unfounded claims," it recalled its ambassador. Davutoğlu accused the Vatican of “joining the conspiracy” of an “evil front.”

When the European Union spoke out on the genocide, Turkey called the resolution a "preposterous" repetition of "the anti-Turkish clichés of the Armenian propaganda" "mutilating history and law," and ascribed characterization of the events as genocide to "religious & cultural fanaticism." Other states have this spring earned similar rebukes and diplomatic retaliations.

Some nations, groups, and leaders were more circumspect.

A Genocide By Any Other Name?

Admittedly, defining genocide on the level of history and international law can be more complex than it seems at first sight to the layperson. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (in my opinion, still the best German newspaper, despite certain marked flaws and idiosyncrasies when it comes to foreign affairs) correctly points out that, legally, this was a matter of intentions and other factors beyond mere numbers (or else Chairman Mao, whose policies killed millions, would appear in the list). The resultant infographic may appear confusing.

The reprehensible but isolated murders of some 762 to 3500 Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla carried out by Lebanese militias in the context of a civil war during the Israeli invasion in 1981 appear as a "genocide" because some UN body asserted they were such, and yet this puts them on a par with the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians and ethnic cleansing of this population from its ancestral lands simply because both have thus (in some sense) been declared to be genocides while neither has been the subject of a formal trial. Meanwhile, the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims has not been officially declared a genocide or prosecuted; thus only the massacre at Srebrenica is listed. The Khmer Rouge butchery in Cambodia is likewise not classified as a genocide, though it has been prosecuted.

The Süddeutsche further argues that the intention of the killers is difficult to determine in the case of Armenia. Some scholars share this view, not necessarily denying the extent of losses, but arguing that the overall picture is too complex to justify the designation. Others see a growing consensus that the crimes were indeed part of a deliberate and systematic policy and thus did constitute a genocide: a recent review of three new books in The Financial Times is a case in point. Middle East Forum has just published a very useful backgrounder, providing an overview of the issue and links to articles representing the full range of viewpoints.

The Economist, in a piece similar to that in the Süddeutsche, observes:

The
“g-word” has considerable power. If mass slaughter is recognised as
genocide when it is happening, it is harder for outside forces to sit
idly by. When it is over, official recognition that it was genocide can
give the survivors some grim satisfaction. But when that recognition is
withheld, whether because of a technicality or political expediency, it
can feel like the final insult. And some human-rights activists and
legal scholars feel that genocide’s status as the “crime of crimes”
sometimes overshadows the horror of other crimes against humanity.

Part of the problem, then, is that the subject involves legal, historical, moral, and emotional issues at once.

A case in point has been Israel's reluctance to use the "g-word." It is ironic in some ways. Jews were among the first to call attention to and commemorate the slaughter. It was the US Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr. who reported on the massacres and confronted the Turkish government. Franz Werfel produced the first great literary representation of the suffering of the Armenians in his novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933; English, 1934; a reference to an Armenian stronghold in 1915). And it was Polish Holocaust refugee Raphael Lemkin who coined the term "genocide" and explicitly cited the Armenian example.

This is sometimes said to derive from the concern that doing so might dilute the significance of the Holocaust, but it is not the real reason and is in any case a groundless fear. Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust remembrance authority, refers to the Armenian genocide in honoring Armenian Holocaust rescuers and likewise speaks of genocides in Rwanda and Darfur and includes survivors of those murders in its educational programs. The real issue has been geopolitics, pure and simple: specifically, a reluctance to harm relations with Israel's erstwhile regional ally Turkey, and now, new regional ally Azerbaijan. (Raphael Ahren provides perhaps the best and most nuanced overview.) The centennial has sparked a welcome new debate, with echoes in the worldwide Jewish community. (1, 2, 3).

we share the pain suffered by Armenians during this period. We also believe that any acknowledgment by religious or political leaders of the tragedy that befell Armenians should be balanced, constructive and must also recognize Turkish and Muslim suffering.

In this respect, characterizing the events of 1915 as genocide without proper investigation of these events by independent historians will not only jeopardize the establishment of a just memory pertaining to these events, but will also damage the efforts aimed at achieving reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

Calling for further investigation by historians has, of course, always been the preferred delaying tactic and escape strategy for those unwilling to call the killings a genocide. (Rule of thumb: outsiders defer to historians only when there is an ulterior motive; we don't get much respect otherwise.)

Those Who Have Power Yet Do Not Speak Truth

Although the stance of the Israeli government strikes many as problematic or even morally indefensible, it is at the least understandable in the world of Realpolitik and the struggle for survival. One struggles in vain to find an explanation for the behavior of those who are more powerful and can act with impunity.

the secretary-general firmly believes that the commemoration and continuing cooperation between Armenians and Turks “with a view to establishing the facts about what happened should strengthen our collective determination to prevent similar atrocity crimes from ever happening in the future."

The United Nations, founded in the wake of the worst genocide in history, unanimously approved the Genocide Convention in 1948, and is supposed to be the leader in moral issues, not a splitter and trimmer.

Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term 'genocide' to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. … as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Now no one who has reached the age of reason should be surprised that candidates make promises that they cannot (or perhaps do not even intend to) fulfill. But this was a candidate who made a point of promising something different: hope and change and an end to partisanship and politics as usual. The bigger the failed promise, the greater the disappointment. According to CNN, a presidential spokesperson addressed the issue in the clinical language of bureaucracy and diplomacy:

"We know and respect that there are some who are hoping to hear different language this year," the official said. "We understand their perspective, even as we believe that the approach we have taken in previous years remains the right one -- both for acknowledging the past, and for our ability to work with regional partners to save lives in the present."

Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) said:

"How long must the victims and their families wait before our nation has the courage to confront Turkey with the truth about the murderous past of the Ottoman Empire?" "If not this President, who spoke so eloquently and passionately about recognition in the past, whom? If not after one hundred years, when?"

Unfortunately, it is part of a consistent pattern on the part of a president whose foreign policy has been an almost complete disaster (1, 2). (full disclosure: I voted for him twice, eyes wide open). In a region in chaos, he declined to support the Iranian "green revolution" or the real democrats of the "Arab Spring" and instead perversely chose to throw in his lot with the anti-democratic, obscurantist Islamists: Morsi in Egypt and the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu regime in Turkey. The former is out of power, but the President naively and vainly seeks to curry favor with the latter, in defiance of both historical truth and basic political judgment. The Armenians, among others, are paying the price.

Meanwhile, by contrast, quietly and outside the corridors of power, some Turks joined Armenians in marking the centenary in Turkey, and that is ultimately far more important than the words of an American president: dialogue and reconciliation on the ground, among the peoples concerned.

Today we have a chance to reaffirm our record on the Armenian genocide as Massachusetts and 42 other states have already done. I’m proud that our state continues to stand firm on this issue and educates our students about the history of the Armenian genocide in public schools through the Facing History program.

I am pleased and proud that the Town of Amherst will acknowledge this crime against humanity on the occasion of its centennial, calling upon residents to honor the dead and the survivors and to draw the appropriate lessons in the continuing struggle for human rights in our own world.

On April 30, at 5:00 p.m. in front of Town Hall, Town officials will read the proclamation, and along with other residents, speak to the historical and enduring significance of this issue. (Town Meeting and League of Women Voters member Adrienne Megerdichian Terrizzi has generously taken the lead in organizing the event.)

At 7:00 p.m. at Amherst Books, my Hampshire College colleague, Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, will read from her provocative new book: Sacred Justice: The Voices & Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis. This work combines narrative, memoir, and primary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men
who undertook a covert operation created to
assassinate the Turkish architects of the Genocide.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Two examples of the markers used to designate graves of Revolutionary War soldiers in Amherst. (Walking through the cemetery today, I noted at least one mistake: a case in which, judging from the age on the tombstone, the person buried there cannot have served in the Revolution.)

Thursday, April 16, 2015

It is a truism--and a typical piece of philistine thinking--to say that it is "impossible" for words, or art, to capture the reality of the Holocaust. On some level, words and art--the only tools at our disposal--are "incapable" of capturing many realities and experiences, and yet we use them to try to approximate that goal. Still, most of us would nonetheless agree that addressing the Holocaust through the arts does pose steep challenges. Just avoiding the maudlin, the hackneyed, and the banal is challenge enough--never mind actually capturing the essence of the tragedy or making an original aesthetic statement.

And what of music commemorating the Holocaust?

At first, it seems hard even to think of pieces that might serve such a debate. Commemoration and depiction have been much more the domain of literature. Still, there are examples.

When I was a kid, I was present in New York at the world premiere of Darius Milhaud's cantata, "Ani M'amin" ("I Believe") to text by Elie Wiesel. In the words of a recent review: "a meditation on the possibility of faith in the presence of unbridled and seemingly unpunished evil." In all honesty, mostly what sticks in my mind is one rather cynical adult saying he had enjoyed the Holocaust more. He was, I suspect, no fan of modern and contemporary music. I am. Still . . .

I hadn't listened to the piece in years. I enjoy much of Milhaud's music, but somehow, this one, and this particular style of choral singing never did much for me. In any case, you can judge for yourself from this excerpt.

Here, for what it's worth, are some of the compositions that I find most accomplished or most regularly play:

Lukas Foss, Elegy for Anne Frank

I've always been partial to the music of Lukas Foss, the German-born American composer who succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as professor of music at UCLA.

His "Elegy for Anne Frank" is a modest but moving piece. The elegiacal mood, crudely interrupted by variations on the Nazi hymn, the "Horst Wessel Song" (not as the Milken Archive describes it: the "German national anthem"), before returning to the original register, somehow captures both the innocence of the insightful girl and the anxiety of life in the Secret Annex. (It exists in two versions, one with spoken text, and one without, critics generally preferring the latter.)

Speaking of Schoenberg, this treatment of the Holocaust stands out by virtue of its relatively early date (1947) and its power. Although Schoenberg had converted to Catholicism, the rise of Nazism prompted him to return to Judaism. The text is Schoenberg's own, based on the account of a survivor of the Ghetto Uprising and liquidation. In the liner notes, fellow composer Nancy Van de Vate, noting that "many" regard the composition as "Schoenberg's most dramatic and moving work," describes it as follows:

The narration is in Sprechstimme, a kind of speech-singing which Schoenberg developed, precisely notated for rhythms, more approximately for pitches, Olbrychski's moving narration is uniquely authentic, yet faithful to Schoenberg's notation. The cantata builds to a powerful, dramatic climax when, at "the grandiose moment," the male chorus begins spontaneously to sing the Shema Yisroel ("Hear, O Israel") in Hebrew, the third language of Schoenberg's life. It is "the old prayer" central to Judaism, that its martyrs have sung throughout history in defiance and resignation in their hour of death. It is the dramatic climax of the piece, for which Schoenberg has skillfully prepared the listener from the narrator's first lines when a French horn softly played the opening of the Shema Yisroel melody.

The music vividly accentuates textual details throughout. A trumpet fanfare first awakens the Jews for transport to death camps. There are suggestions of military drum, unusual string effects from taps or scratches of string with bow sticks, high woodwind trills, muted brass fluttertonguing, snarls of muted horns and trumpets. The music builds to the terrifying counting off, louder and faster to prepare for the choral entry. "They began again, first slowly: One two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began to sing the Shema Yisroel." The sung Hebrew dramatically contrasts with the spoken English and brutal Nazi commands, and gives the work a powerful, moving climax in its only extended melody.

Here is a version narrated by the great Maximilian Schell:

I have a couple of recordings of this piece, but the following version, by Polish performers, conveniently combines it with other works commemorating the atrocities of the Second World War.

No list of Holocaust music would be complete without

Krzysztof Penderecki's "Dies Irae," or Auschwitz Oratorio.

Back in the day when I was a high school student, first learning properly about classical music, this piece was issued on a vinyl LP with a bleak black-and-white image of a crematorium chimney. Popular, too, was his "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," and these became obligatory items on the record shelves of all right-thinking progressives who prattled on about "man's inhumanity to man" even if they didn't really know any history and could not fully appreciate the jarring, and indeed, terrifying music. They may have bought it, but I really doubt they often listened to it.

Penderecki's piece, composed for the dedication of the international memorial at the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) death camp in 1967, differs from the others here in that it does not focus on the Jewish victims. Although Jews made up the largest number of victims at Auschwitz, the camp served first for the internment of Polish political prisoners, and subversives and resisters from many countries. It is also a site of specifically Polish national mourning. Penderecki is also Catholic (literally and figuratively) in his textual choices. Although he does not use the text of the requiem mass, he draws upon the Psalms, Apocalypse, Revelation, and Corinthians, as well as Greek tragedy and modern poetry.

The piece also reminds us of a very exciting time in the history of avant-garde music and other arts, not least, when artistic experimentation flourished in the countries of the East Bloc between the tyranny of Stalinism and the prosaic repression and philistinism of the post-1967 "normalization" and the following "era of stagnation."

As Nancy Van de Vate says in her liner notes,

Dies Irae
is an atonal, extremely dissonant work employing precise notated
pitches, quater-tones, and sounds of indeterminate pitch. As in other
works from the composer's early period . . . combinations of many
unusual timbres, used both simultaneously and in succession, create
unusual textures, neither homophonic nor conventionally polyphonic.
Extreme dynamic contrast, from the softest to the loudest imaginable
musical sounds, adds further to the music's drama and intensity. The
sound of an air raid siren at the end of the second movement intensifies
a section of the music which depicts beasts and men being burned alive.
The rattling of a chain and shaking of a thunder-sheet (lastra) further
evoke feelings of fear and horror appropriate to the subject.
The chorus
sing, speak and chant with an unusual variety of vocal sounds. The
imagery of their text is dramatic and terrible, ranging from references
to the shorn hair of a little girl's pigtail once tugged by cheeky boys
at school to the triumphant "Death is swallowed up by victory" (Absorpta est mors in victoria) of the final movement. Yet the work closes tragically with the phrase Corpora parvulorum (Bodies of the little ones) which has been heard many times earlier.

Part I:

I am a great fan of mid-century modernism in all fields, from architecture to avant-garde music, but more recently, the minimalists have made their contribution, too.

Among more contemporary compositions, one that I find the most compelling is

Steve Reich, Different Trains

Trains, along with chimneys and barbed wire, are among the most common and evocative images of the Holocaust as the epitome of modern industrialized death. (Not coincidentally, a train also figures on the cover art of the final CD that I will mention.)

Using the symbol of the train, Reich's piece offers a brilliant and troubling mediation on the vagaries of chance:

The concept for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since the arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.

He says that the work, commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, "begins a new
way of composing," "the basic idea" being "that speech recordings
generate the musical material for musical instruments." It features recordings of his governess, an African-American Pullman porter, three Holocaust survivors, and historical train sounds from the era of his childhood journeys. It is divided into three parts:

America--Before the war
Europe--During the war
After the war

Popular music has not often ventured into the territory of the Holocaust, and that's probably a good thing. Still, there are notable exceptions. One of the truly great albums isYehuda Poliker, Efer ve Avak (Ash[es] and Dust)

Poliker is one of the most multi-talented and influential Israeli musicians, a compelling vocalist and a stunning soloist on a wide range of intstruments. His parents were Greek Holocaust survivors, deported from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, and at the same time as Reich was writing "Different Trains," Poliker teamed up with son of Polish Auschwitz survivors Yaacov Gilad, who wrote most of the lyrics for "Ashes and Dust." Eight of the twelve songs deal with the Holocaust, and the album became not only a bestseller and reflection of Israeli Holocaust culture, but also a shaper of it: specifically, in the shift from collective to individual commemoration, and in its emphases on the new role of children of survivors in shaping the reception of the events as the focus moved from history to memory.

Like much of the best Holocaust literature (I always think of the works of Aharon Appelfeld), this music succeeds because it is subtle and often indirect, moving around the margins of the topic, confronting it by implication rather than declaration. The result is an overwhelming mood, a persistent sense of loss.

Haaretz today ran an article, "A dozen reasons why Israel should do away with Holocaust Remembrance Day." It was no doubt supposed to be provocative, but even if some of the individual points were valid or worth discussing, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Above all, in condemning the holiday "because it has become a tool in the hands of ultranationalist ideologues," the piece simply substitutes one political agenda for another. It's one of those ideas that, as the saying goes (not in fact Orwell's, but close to his thinking) is so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it.

One might as well say that we should end Fourth of July celebrations because American patriotism sometimes degenerates into triumphalist jingoism. The solution is not to do away with the holiday, and rather, to infuse it with new and deeper meaning. The founding of a revolutionary democracy or the commission of genocide are worth commemorating, and far too important to discard on the whims of a self-important op-ed writer.

At the very least, the simple and non-political rituals of commemoration should seem unobjectionable. The traditional ritual of mourning on the anniversary of death involves lighting a candle that burns for a full day.

I have taken to placing mine on top of this immense old candlestick, of hammered iron in the Arts & Crafts or Werkbund style, circa the beginning of the twentieth century.

The dealer I bought it from acquired it from a scrap metal dealer in Dortmund, so it's precise origin is unknown, Clearly, though, given its striking size (77 cm. tall, or just over 30 inches), it came from institutional setting rather than a private home. In fact, it is identical in appearance to a brass one sold at auction over a decade ago. That one came from the destroyed Leipzig synagogue in the Gottschedstraße, destroyed in Kristallnacht. It seems more than likely, then, that what I have here is another relic from the pogrom that began the Holocaust, and as such it seems especially fitting to call it into service for this use.

Many have remarked on the challenge of representing the genocide through conventional monuments. Some do, however, succeed in being both original and powerful.

Still, to me, the most powerful "monument" is actually a ritual used in Israel: On the morning of Holocaust Memorial day, an air raid siren sounds, and the entire country literally comes to a halt for two minutes. People stop where they stand on the sidewalk, cars and buses pull over to the side of the road, and drivers and passengers get out and stand respectfully in silence. Then life resumes. It is the most eerie and moving ritual I have ever seen.

It is evanescent, yet eternal: lasting only two minutes yet repeated every year. It is a monument in time, of time. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. . . . Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.”

And because this ritual so abruptly interrupts daily time itself, it conveys almost better than anything the tear in the fabric of the world and civilization that the Holocaust represented.

Footnote:

I have often thought that the United States should adopt something similar for Memorial Day. I still recall how, as children, we stood and observed a moment of silence at 11:11 a.m. on November 11, in tribute to Veterans' Day's origins as Armistice Day. We have lost that sense of an entire nation united in mourning the tragic costs of war.

Monday, April 13, 2015

In April-May 1940, the security services of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which had concluded a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939 and then occupied the eastern part of Poland after the Germans invaded from the west in September, murdered some 22,000 Poles--soldiers, intelligentsia, and other suspect classes--at Katyń forest near Smolensk and other locations.

On April 13, 1943, the Nazis, acting on rumors from locals, announced the discovery of one mass grave at Katyń forest near Smolensk. The Soviets emphatically denied the charges. The incident led to a break in relations between the London Polish Government-in-Exile and the Soviet regime.

The incident long remained controversial, as the Soviets insisted that these were the victims of German occupiers. In fact, I recall my father saying that, while he was serving with the US occupation forces in Germany (OMGUS), he found Germans testifying to "terrible crimes" they had committed in that area, which no one was willing to address.

This illustrated magazine, produced by the Nazi regime, conveyed the news to the occupied Polish population in May, 1943. The cover is a harmless depiction of the lobster harvest in Martinique (which was then under the control of the Vichy French regime).

Without warning, the next page reveals the horror of the Katyń massacre--conveyed through a Nazi propaganda lens.

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To Find the Principles:

Reflections on historical scholarship and the use and abuse of history in public life and popular culture. (Particularly egregious examples of the latter will earn a stern rebuke; ratings system of appropriate opprobrium at the bottom of this page.)

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On the first anniversary of the creation of the Empire, Napoleon won "the greatest battle of [his] career" when he defeated the f...

Ratings of topics featured (appropriate opprobrium)

(1) What were they thinking?! (2) Very bad! (3) Nauseating!

Note: The numbers do not necessarily imply a sequential ranking, though the helpful canine in # 2 is the most useful and generally applicable icon, capable of expressing reaction to a multitude of sins that may occasion some of the head-shaking amazement represented by # 1, yet fall short of the moral repugnance represented by # 3.